


Imago

by road_rhythm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Hallucination Lucifer (Supernatural) | Hallucifer, M/M, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:08:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26911894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/road_rhythm/pseuds/road_rhythm
Summary: Just south of Flagstaff, Arizona, people are killing their loved ones. Dean's been grim, since Frank died. (Since before that.) Sam got some sleep back in Nevada. He doesn't know that was the last time yet.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 38
Kudos: 80





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't sure whether to tag this Sam/Dean or Sam & Dean. All I can tell you is that there will probably be too much Wincest to make people happy with the & tag, and not enough to make people happy with the / tag. Ditto for m/m vs gen.
> 
> It's not quite coincidence I'm starting a fic (approximately) set in Flagstaff right after finishing [one that's all about it,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26875957) but this isn't any sort of sequel. They could both happen in the same universe if you want, though I'm not sure I do.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Set between 07x16, "Out with the Old," and 07x17, "The Born-Again Identity."

The world is white.

This isn't a blizzard, or even that bad of a storm for the elevation, but the snow is heavy and wet. The flakes are those fat ones that clump together and become visible as flying, backlit shadow against the sky. The snow strains sound out of the air. It's quiet.

The snake on the floor of the car uncoils from its ball and onto Sam's shoe. Sam, tapping the brakes lightly, is glad it picked his left foot.

It's a pretty snake. Its scales are gold shading into silver, patterned like a ball python's. When it wraps around Sam's ankle and begins to climb up under his pants leg, he can feel the ripple of its ventral scales. It traces over his kneecap with its snout and trails the rest of its body up his calf under the denim; it's smooth and firm.

The snake pushes up to Sam's groin, taking a circuitous route between his balls and over his cock, and he's at half mast by the time it pulls the last of itself free of his genitals. Cool, dry snake tongue flickers over his ribs as it wraps itself around his torso. The creature contracts slightly, but only to propel itself upward. The windshield wipers cut the snow in wide half-moons; the snake pushes itself up along Sam's spine between his back and the seat. On the passenger side, Dean's breath fogs the passenger side window where he's got a spare jacket wadded up between his cheek and the glass. He stirs, his face creasing, but the frown evens out and he's pulled under again while the tires hiss on the pavement.

White coats the trees. Here and there, it's interrupted by red: splotches against tree trunks; pocks in the dirty layers piled up to either side of the road; streaks over heavy spruce boughs otherwise white and fluffy as wings. Delicate tracks underneath, where deer and other animals have trafficked. It should be brilliant against all the white, but the blood melts some distance into the snow and it's garnet-dark. It's beautiful. The radio gave out into static miles back, but Sam left it on. It's turned down low and it's peaceful enough.

The snake slides its head along the side of Sam's neck, and that _tickles_. He grits his teeth to keep the car steady. The snake wraps itself around his neck, one coil, two, and now it does begin to constrict. Fucking fuck. Sam tries to ignore it. Doesn't work. Breathing's already difficult and there are black spots in his vision within seconds. He cannot afford to get choked unconscious while driving a car. He fumbles at the driver's side arm rest and stabs himself in the thigh with a pencil he left there for the purpose; the snake releases him and tumbles over the edge of the seat back with a hiss.

In the backseat, Lucifer doesn't look up from his game of cat's cradle. "Spoilsport."

Sam glances over at his brother. Dean's face is blank, if not peaceful. He's got his hands jammed in his armpits though it's really not that cold in here, his arms crossed tight over his chest. He's still. That's something. When Dean sleeps in a bed these days, his sleep tends to be either restless or alcohol-heavy. Sam ought to know, given the amount of sleep he hasn't been getting himself since Idaho. Between them on the seat is a body. Sam isn't sure whose. He's been very careful, since they switched places at a gas station and suddenly the thing was there, not to look.

He checks his mirrors, squints out the side window. The snow traces every last tree branch and gives the air that gauzy look. Bits of gore land on the windshield occasionally, streaking in arcs under the wipers, running pink and then clear as more flakes hit. He hasn't seen another vehicle in nearly half an hour. Together, the radio, tires, and engine make a sturdy quilt of white noise. They're nearly to their destination, but Sam almost wants to keep driving, for himself as much as for Dean. Then there's a man in the road.

He comes running out from between the trees, bare feet slipping on the ice, and he goes down on his ass in the southbound lane. He looks up as Sam's bearing down on him: he's crying.

Sam doesn't hit the brakes. There's really only one option, one chance not to hit the old man on the asphalt in his boxers, and Sam pushes down the _no, not again_ and swerves.

He has to wait until his grille is almost eating the meat in the middle of the road, because as soon as the front tires swing left the rear tires swing right, and they're spinning, spinning; Sam surrendered all control of the vehicle the moment he committed to the act and Dean's starting awake and they're at the mercy of the ice.

It only works because Sam wasn't going that fast. The road here is padded to either side by shoulders of plowed-up snow, the incline moderate, and Sam had thought about laying on some speed but had decided against it because of the red tracks under the trees advertising deer. As it is, there isn't too much momentum for the car to lose. It can be contained within two lanes.

 _You're welcome,_ Satan whispers against his ear.

They come to a stop facing the wrong way in the lane Sam started out in. Dean has broken off in the act of cursing him, because his eyes have found the old man in the road. He flings his door open and runs over while Sam coasts the car into a relatively safe spot on the opposite shoulder.

The old man is bawling by the time Sam gets there, completely ignoring Dean's hands on him. "Kill me," he says. The snow makes wet blotches on his gray undershirt. "Kill me."

Dean looks up at Sam. Sam's stomach clenches. He hadn't been able to trust himself that the old man really was what he looked like. He'd been taking a chance that he was even real at all.

"Sir, it's all right, you're— Can you tell us your name?"

The old man ignores Sam. He's still crying, still repeating, "Kill me, just kill me." In addition to being in his underwear, he's barefoot. Sam and Dean trade a look and a nod before they lift the old man to his feet between them; he struggles.

"What happened?" Dean's asking Sam, not the old man.

"He ran out into the road." Sam can see his footprints, which aren't red anymore. "Think he wanted us to hit him."

"Well, I'm betting that's not coincidence." The old man has given up fighting and gone slack in their grip; Dean helps Sam maneuver him into the back, and then they get into the front. The hazard lights tick like a grandfather clock.

The old man lies crumpled on the backseat, staring up at the ceiling with his knees in the air. "Sir," Sam tries again. He puts well practiced federal authority into his voice. "Sir, we need you to tell us what happened."

The man's eyes are raw and glassy. "I killed her."

Dean digs around behind the seat for a blanket and doesn't respond. Sam tamps down on a flare of annoyance— _Thanks for the assist, Dean_ —and asks, "Who?"

"My wife." The man's face breaks. "I killed my wife."

There's spatter on his undershirt, a smear of pink on his arm. Sam thought at first that these were the same as the red soaking the snow, but the snow is unstained now, and the man is not. "What happened?" Sam repeats.

"I hit her. I hit her with a hammer."

Dean's expression is pinched and still sleep-creased. "Do you _remember_ hitting her, or did you just wake up holding the hammer?"

But the old man is shaking his head, rolling it back and forth on the seat. "I remember everything. Everything. Oh, God."

"Why did you kill her?" Sam asks softly.

"Because she asked me to."

"Your wife did?"

"No. Evie asked me to. I killed my Jean because Evie asked me to. Jean's gone. My Jeanie's gone, I hit her with a hammer. There's no one. I killed her, now there's no one."

Sam and Dean stare at him. They do not look at each other.

The man weeps. "Kill me. There's no one. Please kill me."

* * *

When they first caught this case, they were afraid it was a demon. Sam thought that would be just their luck. Of course, Dean has occasionally accused him of optimism.

After they got a good look at Frank's trailer, Dean floored it and didn't stop until they were over the California-Nevada state line. They wouldn't have stopped there, either, but for the fact that Sam was too far gone to take over the wheel. Leviathans had found Frank—professional, congenital paranoiac Frank—dug into the woods in a Winnebago. Sam and Dean didn't stick around analyzing the wreckage to try to work out how much intel they got, because the leviathans getting to Frank already meant the leviathans getting everything. Certainly there was more than enough of his DNA splashed around.

So there was no question of checking into a motel. They didn't even discuss it. Passing a night in the middle of the desert in January carried its own problems, but it wasn't their first time. Dean pulled them into a slot canyon off a disused ranch track off a service road. He liked to steal cars that were American-made and at least from the Impala's decade; this one had a bench seat up front that folded back so it was flat. They zipped their two sleeping bags into one big one, ditched their boots, pulled on extra socks, and got in.

It was frigid and dark. They hadn't shared a bed, of necessity or by choice, in—Sam couldn't say for certain. Years, certainly. So the process was awkward, painfully wanting for rehearsal the way only something that was once instinctive could be.

_—two boys in a bag, two skins under one man-made skin, and all knees and knobs and elbows only because you can't get close enough, we can do better, can't we, remember how much better we could do, remember how much closer we could fit, look, sam, open your eyes and look, i've such things to show you—_

But cold was their guide, and the little trough where the seat back didn't go quite all the way down flat helped too, canting them in toward each other. Eventually they got situated. Getting there was a kind of cooperative wrestling match, kicking and twining their legs together to get the sleeping bags tight around their feet, pressing together along their sides to squeeze out the cold air, facing slightly away from each other so they wouldn't coat each other or the bags with condensation from their breath.

As they twisted and turned, something miraculous happened. Their fight with nylon and jingling zipper tags was loud in the close confines of the car, loud against the flimsy courtesy of shared space, louder than the Devil. Lucifer's narration lost—not volume, but immediacy. Sam imagined that his voice was coming over a radio that Dean had left on too loud, but one which neither of them was going to breach their warm cocoon to reach out and turn down. Loud. Annoying. A bit fixated on topics like the texture of Sam's bone marrow, but a step up from shlock jocks and mattress sales. He found, for the first time in days, that he could _ignore_ it.

So he did.

Cold outside, dry and numbing and still; warm inside, Dean's body solid against his, Dean's breath amplified by the confines of the sleeping bag, as was the rank, animal scent of him. Overhead, stars burned blue, and… it was enough, somehow. It was enough.

As sleep took him, Sam felt Dean's fingers tuck back a lock of his hair. Just that. The gesture left his cheek bare, where the cold air settled against it.

And in the morning, they drove to Elko, Nevada. They needed wifi, fresh electronics, and an anonymous place to sit and try to figure out whether anything was happening in the realm of leviathan activity.

Sam found the headlines that brought them here sitting in the back of a Jimmy John's. In a commuter suburb south of Flagstaff, Arizona, two previously upstanding citizens with no apparent connection to each other had developed a sudden enthusiasm for blunt force homicide in the same week. Nathan Vignaux, 20, of Hopi Village had beaten his girlfriend, Lydia Figueroa, to death with a socket wrench. There was nothing unusual about that, but just two days later a former Army Ranger turned carpet installer killed his best friend and business partner with a carpet stretcher and no apparent motive. Pfc. Lopez turned himself in, but has said nothing since.

In the Elko Jimmy John's, Lucifer massaged Sam's shoulders, leaning in over the back of his chair. "Whatcha think, Sam?" he murmured. "One of your playmates from downstairs, maybe? A little go-bag of collateral damage from Idaho?"

"What do you think?" Sam asked, turning the laptop toward Dean. He laid out his concern: that the first summoning ritual Nora had provided to Jeffrey might not have been enough to bring his demon back, but with luck like theirs, what were the odds that it had hooked nothing at all? There'd been plenty of time for a demon to make its way from Coeur d'Alene to Arizona.

Dean's lips pressed into a line as he listened. "The one that did work, too," he said. He shut the laptop and started packing up his side of the table without looking at Sam. "Someone does a jailbreak like that, it shakes things up. Down there, everybody's always waiting for their shot at the door."

Sam nodded, watching his own fingers flex on the table.

Lucifer's lips curved against his neck. He didn't speak, but Sam heard him, anyway: _Where do you think Dean was in that stampede? How do you picture it in your mind?_

_Want to play the game where we bring the picture to life?_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an exercise in flying by the seat of my pants, so please feel free to mention any typos or other fuckups you may notice.

The old man sits slumped in an interview room. Sam and Dean watch a deputy trying to get him to drink a cup of something hot through the little vertical window in the door. The sheriff stands beside them. She's a stocky woman with hair of helmet-shaped gray; her face, as she watches the same scene, is carefully neutral but the color of curdled milk.

The old man's name is Gerald Burrmeister. Sheriff Eaton has just come from his home. "Yeah, Jean's dead," she says. Her clipped tone says a wealth besides. "Married sixty years, or something like that."

"This is your third, right?" Sam says.

Sheriff Eaton nods. "Regular epidemic. The other two were weird enough, but Gerry—I wouldn't have said he could swing a hammer hard enough to hang a picture, never mind what he did to his wife."

"Anybody get bloodwork on the other two perps?" Dean asks.

"Nathan we haven't found yet, he took off running and hasn't been seen since the night of. As for Pete, I'd have to check the paperwork, but I don't think so."

"Think you can have the hospital do a workup on Mr. Burrmeister?"

"Sure. Guess maybe drugs would explain how Gerry could have done what he did," says the sheriff. She's a tough, undemonstrative type, but there's a pinch around her eyes that suggests she hasn't been getting much sleep.

"A lot of that going around," Lucifer says, twiddling a pen knife into the wall. Blood runs out of the plaster.

Sam tips his head toward the interrogation room. "Mind if I sit in?"

Sheriff Eaton either isn't territorial or is past caring; she nods.

"And, uh, the other one." Dean consults a steno pad. "Peter Lopez, can I talk to him?"

Eaton raises her eyebrows and crosses to her desk, uniform boots loud on the tile. "Be my guest if you want to try." She returns and hands Dean a file. "He's over at the county jail. Hasn't said a word since he walked through that door over there"—She nods at the glass door, frosted with a sheriff's star and reflecting the inside lights in a sheet as the day outside turns blue and falters.—"covered in blood, and said, 'I killed Scott.' Won't say why. Doesn't want a lawyer. Just, 'I'm guilty.'"

Dean scans the file, snaps it shut, and says, "I think I'll try my luck." He glances at Sam. "Uh, we didn't have a chance to get checked into our accommodations before our case ran out in front of our car," he tells Eaton, indicating his distinctly non-federal street clothes. "There a bathroom I can change in? Thanks."

As Dean heads out to grab the monkey suit, Sam glances up. Another Sam is looking back from across the room.

The other Sam is a couple years younger, dewy-skinned, built like a truck. He stands silently and smirks.

Sam swallows and turns back to Sheriff Eaton. He gestures toward the interview room door. "Shall we?"

* * *

Night's solid in the window set high into the interview room wall. Gerald sits at the table across from them, slumped, gaze somewhere around his stomach if he's even seeing anything.

"This Evie person, Mr. Burrmeister," says Eaton. "She have a last name?"

No answer.

"How about a description." Eaton clicks the button at the top of her retractable pen in, out, in again. "What's she look like?"

No answer.

The cops have put the old man in some sweatpants the sheriff had in her locker and a windbreaker from the office coat tree. The only spare shoes in the building were a deputy's size 14s, and these hang off Gerald Burrmeister's skinny ankles like Ronald McDonald's Nikes.

They've gotten next to nothing out of him—just enough to confirm what Sam knew the moment he said he killed his wife just because a mysterious woman asked him to. Gerald met Evie in the diner down on Route 17. She was perfect. He can recall very little about her beyond this. Their eyes met, and she slipped him a phone number while his wife was asking a waitress for Tabasco sauce. Soon they were meeting in secret and Gerald was head over heels at 83. She talked to him for hours. She made him come alive. She helped him forget his mistakes and made him want to be a better man. She was everything that Gerald needed from her. She was all the things his wife no longer was, and a few she'd never been.

Sheriff Eaton leans back in her chair and watches him. Sam can see the struggle on her face: the man before her is elderly, fragile, and pathetic; but she's been to his house and seen what he's done, and the cast-off spatter on his undershirt is vivid in the fluorescent lights. She clears her throat. "You said you argued with Jean." She twiddles her pen. "What was the argument about?"

Gerald raises his head. Then he looks down at himself. "Laundry."

"I'm sorry?"

Under the blood, the undershirt has yellow pit stains and food traces on the front. "Laundry," Gerald says again. "Jean doesn't like me wearing dirty things. Our washer's broken and we can't have a repair man out until our next check from Social Security. She wanted to take the car to the laundromat and do the laundry, so we'd have clean things to wear."

"Okay," says Sheriff Eaton.

"She doesn't like me wearing dirty things."

Eaton's thumb clicks the point of the pen in, out. "Okay."

Sam prompts Gerald. "You argued?"

Gerald looks, once again, like he's going to cry. "She wanted to take the car to do the laundry. But I said I needed the car. She asked me what for. I… I…."

Sam exhales and catches Eaton's eye.

Back out in the office's main room, Eaton stares at the interrogation room window for a moment before she shakes her head and turns back to Sam. "Wouldn't have pegged him for the cheating type, but I guess you can't ever tell. Think this Evie person is behind your other ones in Colorado?"

Dean has already fed Eaton their cover story about a rash of similar incidents across state lines. "Right now we're keeping an open mind and just trying to get all the facts. Can I see the file on the Figueroa murder?"

Eaton has it handy on her desk; she actually has to collect a few photos and shove them back in. Sam sits at an empty workstation and tries to tune out the hum from the fluorescent bulbs overhead. The sheriff stands over one of his shoulders as he starts flipping through the file. Lucifer stands over his other, snapping his neck with a rubber band.

"Primary suspect is Nathan Vignaux; he was the boyfriend, and a security camera caught him in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, covered in blood. That was the last anybody's seen of him. Him and Lydia were an item since way back when. Everybody called 'em Romeo and Juliet, 'cause their families hated each other."

Sam turns over a new photo. It's Lydia Figueroa on an autopsy block. Most of her jaw is gone. "How come?"

"Racial thing. Nathan's folks are big 'go back where you came from' types; Lydia's family were immigrants. The two of them were sneaking around all through high school, then as soon as they both turned eighteen they moved in together. Sounds like it was tough, like you'd expect for a couple of kids on their own, but they were making it work. Lydia was a candy striper up at the hospital in Flagstaff. Nathan is—was—a busboy at the Over Easy."

"The Over Easy—is that the same diner Mr. Burrmeister mentioned?"

"Yep."

"Was Nathan seen talking to anyone there? Not necessarily anyone meeting Evie's description, but anyone new?"

"Like another woman, you mean?" Eaton props one hip against the desk and stares at the opposite wall. A sparrow is nailed to the corkboard there, its wings straining, tiny heart beating like a living ruby where its chest has been pinned open. "We interviewed about a dozen friends and old classmates, his and hers. Some of them thought maybe Nathan was stepping out, some thought she was, but most of them assumed Nathan and Lydia were solid." She nods at a crime scene photo of bedding spotted with brain matter. "Until that."

* * *

Since Dean's got the car, Sheriff Eaton gives Sam a ride down to the only motel Hopi Village has to offer. It's a remarkable combination of seedy and bland, but the laundromat is strategically located right across the street, so when Dean gets back from the county jail, they head over.

"So, it's a lock," says Dean, inspecting a fed shirt fresh from the dryer before laying it down on the vintage ironing board. Other than an ancient attendant asleep behind a cardboard WASH N FOLD DROPOFF sign, he and Sam have the place to themselves. "Pete Lopez also had a special someone bust mysteriously into his life. But Pete's? Not a lady. Not a lay, period."

Sam doesn't ask how Dean got the soldier to talk to him. "Who was it?"

"Someone calling himself Colonel Norris."

Sam looks up from his laundry basket. "Come again?"

"Pete was in the Special Forces, right? Well, they discharged him after he blew out his knee in a training exercise. He took it hard. His best friend, the one he killed, basically saved his life by helping him get his head right and giving him something to live for, to wit: cleaning and installing carpets. They started the business together. Sounds like they were doing all right, too, you know; definitely not rich, but not bad. Then one day this guy shows up at the office while only Pete is there and says he's Colonel Norris and he's there to recruit Pete Lopez, cleaner of carpets, former tactical specialist, owner of busted ACL, for a special secret mission."

"Uh."

"Yeah."

Sam stares at the washing machine in front of him. Inside, clothes tumble through a vortex of blood rimed with suds. He knows that the avenue of thought he's walking down now, Dean's already trod.

_I gave him what he needed, and it wasn't some bitch in a g-string._

Sam flinches at the buzzer for the dryer. The laundromat is of the same vintage as their motel, early to mid-80s, and everything's grimy and the light is harsh in here. There's a TV on in one of the apartments overhead. The wings he hears are always just out of sight, and Lucifer's torso is half-hidden in a washer he's working on with a wrench, pulling out wires and belts and organs silvery with connective tissue. The colors of the gum balls in the machine by the door are too bright and too varied for Sam's eyes to keep track of, contributing to a throbbing in his temples and a general ratcheting up his blood pressure.

Dean hangs up the fed shirt he just finished ironing and gestures until Sam tosses him another. "Did Pete say why he did it?" Sam asks.

"The colonel told him he had to prove himself. Prove his loyalty—prove his love for his country."

Up to now, some part of Sam was still hoping that this still might turn out to be a demon. They have a better track record with demons. "So that fits, then. With what we've seen before."

"Yeah. But this thing came to him. It must've stalked him somewhere."

"I might have an idea where," Sam says, picking through the basket to find the mate to a sock and ignoring the clean, ivory vertebrae mixed in. "Gerald met his mystery woman at the diner out on Route 17, the Over Easy. Nathan was a busboy there. Maybe Pete ate there, too. Doesn't necessarily mean much, in a town this size, but…."

"But on the other hand, in a town this size, it'd all but guarantee access to anyone and everyone." Dean scratches his nose for a minute, then raises an eyebrow and unplugs the iron. After a glance at the fossilized attendant, he joins Sam at the table with the baskets and lowers his voice. "A diner would be pretty fuckin' smart, actually. It could get its saliva into—hell, anybody who drank the coffee, or ate the eggs, or…."

"Yeah. Exactly."

A jewel-bright beetle the size of a saucer lumbers over Dean's hand as he drums his fingers on the table. "Yeah, okay. We can go check it out in the morning. Breakfast is Taco Bell, though."

They shoulder their duffels full of reasonably clean clothes and head back across the road to their motel.

Inside the room, they stow the laundry, handing over boxers and t-shirts that ended up in the wrong bag. The occupant of the next room is watching _Friends,_ and every time the laugh track goes off the taxidermy jackalope mounted over the nightstand spasms and moans. Sam lifts a pair of jeans from the pile. The snake is under it. He drops the jeans back on top.

They've yet to say the word _siren_ out loud.

Sam takes a breath. "How do you want to play it?"

Dean shoves a t-shirt into his bag. "Play what?"

Sam picks his words carefully. It's futile, but he tries. "Last time we hunted one of these things, we painted a target on our backs and we didn't even know it. Maybe we should try to be a little less obvious here."

"Sam, this thing reads minds. It's gonna make us as soon as we end up in the same room with it."

"Okay, sure, but— What's a dead giveaway for hunters, if you're something that knows hunters?"

Dean holds up a sock with a hole in the heel and an old bloodstain on the toe. "Cheap beer and high fashion?"

"And the FBI showing up in Nowheresville. Look, I'm not saying there are any great options here, just—that we need to be careful. Not only with our aliases; with everything." The dresser Sam's sitting in front of rattles with the struggles of something within it. He doesn't say, _We got our asses handed to us last time;_ he doesn't say, _We only survived one of these because Bobby showed up;_ and he definitely doesn't say, _Bobby won't be showing up this time;_ but he has to say, "Sirens—they're worse than shapeshifters. Shapeshifters we can test for, shapeshifters don't mess with your head. I'm just saying—"

"That I don't know my job?"

The dresser thumps. "No, of course not."

"I know the lore, Sam, and I haven't forgotten what happened before. In fact, I seem to remember it got you right where it wanted you, too—"

Sam jumps as the drawer by his head cracks and splinters.

Dean breaks off. "Sammy?"

Sam shuts his eyes and presses his thumb into the scar; the banging and thumping subside with a quiet laugh in his ear.

"How you doing?" Dean asks, too carefully.

Sam zips up the duffel and stands. "Fine."

"What are you seeing?"

Sam looks around the room. The jackalope is still twitching, but each burst of noise from next door no longer sends ripples over the wallpaper. Blood soaks through the carpet under his feet, leaving tacky, glistening footprints. The planes and angles of the structure they're in are, for the moment, obeying the laws of Euclidean geometry, at least when he looks straight at them, and Dean himself is whole. The sense of a presence is still there, but it's always there. "Lucifer is standing behind you critiquing your wardrobe," Sam says, which is true.

"Satan wishes he looked this good," Dean says reflexively. He's still watching Sam, though, his concern poorly hidden.

"It's…" Sam indicates the room at large. "…fine. I'm just tired. It's harder to tune him out when I'm tired, that's all."

Dean looks him up and down. "Yeah, fair enough. I know you slept last night 'cause of the windows rattling from your snores, but that was your first in, what? Two days?"

Three. "Something like that. It's fine. I just have to—tune it all out, get to sleep." Sam busies himself with laying out the clothing and weapons he needs for tomorrow.

It's not the hallucinations that have his stomach in knots, really. It's more specific concerns. What if last night was a fluke? What if he can't get to sleep? How long will the sleep he got in the car last him if he can't? Will it last him through this hunt?

He can feel Dean's eyes on him still. "Want me to help you relax?" Dean offers; his voice is lighter than his gaze. "Brush your hair? Give you a back rub?"

Sam chucks a balled-up pair of socks at his head.

But Dean gets ready for an early-ish night beside him, and they both get into bed, and the heater in here is crap so it's chilly but that actually makes it nicer to be under the covers. Sam can hear Dean's breathing, three feet away and heavy with the nightcap he had. The TV next door is still going; so is the long, slow scraping of something under the bed. Both sounds are familiar. Just before it happens, Sam realizes, with relief: _I'm falling asleep._

* * *

He wakes.

Nothing woke him. The room is dark and still, the neighbor's TV long since doused. One moment Sam's asleep; then he's not. The clock radio on top of the TV says 2:13.

The Devil's sitting on the end of his bed looking just like him. On the coverlet, the snake coils and uncoils. "Come play with me," he says.

Sam gets out of bed and follows him into the bathroom.

There's no moon, but the light coming from the narrow rectangular window over the shower is about the same color, casting other-Sam's body in pale blue and shadow. He's sitting on the edge of the tub; Sam sits on the top of the toilet seat, angled to face himself.

Sam-the-Devil loops string around his hands: over the wrist, around the fingers; repeat on other hand; insert opposite fingers into smaller loop; repeat; pull taut. He holds the cat's cradle out to Sam.

"Just one game," he says. "If you play one game with me, I'll let you sleep."

Sam bites his lip. The string is some dark color, hard to see in the dimness. He reaches out, pinches the Xes in the string between his thumbs and forefingers, and pulls.

Cradle. Soldier's Bed. Candles. Manger.

"I miss you," Sam-the-Devil says. "I miss our long talks."

Sam pulls his hands apart; Lucifer slips his hands between. The string transforms around their fingers.

"Do you remember the game where we used to look at your atoms?"

"Yes." Sam keeps his voice low so as not to wake Dean. "Sort of. The memories are—"

"—different up here. Yes." Pinch, dip, under, around, pull.

They're quiet for a while. Sam makes Diamonds; Satan makes Cat's Eye. Careful insertion of thumb and forefinger, careful transfer and withdrawal: Candles.

Sam-the-Devil moves smooth and sure. He makes it easy for Sam to match his movements with their hands that are the same. Except for the scar, of course. "I like nature," he says. "Its laws are beautiful. Of course, many of the laws _we're_ made of are the same. Not all of them, though. I liked the desert outside Las Vegas; thank you for taking us there."

Sam tries to make Saw. He tries to set up Grandfather Clock, but Satan won't let him.

"That wasn't for you," Sam says.

"Everything is for me."

Fish in a Dish. Hand Drum. String games require the loop to be kept under constant tension; they move in concert to transform one figure into another.

"You have very pretty atoms, Sam."

The string is smooth. "You're cheating."

"You can't cheat at Cat's Cradle."

There's a knock at the door.

Sam starts and instinctively looks toward the sound. He feels the string go slack and collapse around his fingers; it's gone when he looks back.

"Sam?" Dean calls. "You in there?"

(He doesn't ask: _Who ya talking to?_ )

Sam clears his throat. "Yeah. Yeah, just dinner not sitting so easy. Sorry, uh, you need to get in here?"

Shadows shift under the edge of the door. "Uh, no. No, I don't need to get in there."

"Oh. Okay. Well, I'll be right out."

After a minute, Dean's feet scuff on the carpet and the shadows disappear. When Sam turns back to the tub, the Devil's gone. There's just Dean lying in it, his jaw missing like Lydia Figueroa's.

Sam flushes and washes his hands for show, goes out to where Dean is a too-still lump under his covers, and gets back in bed. He closes his eyes and the room is quiet, but sleep does not find him this time.

He wonders if maybe he's hidden.

* * *

The Over Easy sits between a Shell station and a Dollar General on the main road headed into town. Sam scans the terrain inside and his eyes land on a table against the side wall with a ficus tree behind it. He glances at Dean, who tips his head toward the table.

"Morning!" Their waitress is blond, smiling, early 40s; her jeans pull tight over generous hips and her eyes have crinkles in the corners, but Lucifer points out from the next booth that Dean would probably bang her. "Can I get you gentlemen started with something to drink?"

"Coffee."

"Coffee."

"Coming right up."

Sam reaches for his menu on autopilot only to stop. He sees Dean have the same realization he's having: staking out a diner where they dare not eat or drink anything is going to be awkward.

And it is. It would be even if Lucifer were not flapping around the place as a six-winged bat the size of a Port-a-John crapping brimstone on patrons' waffles. When their waitress sets down their coffee and draws out her order pad, Dean tells her they're waiting for someone. Time goes by, a lot of it, in which they remark zero men of any age acting lovestruck, no glances exchanged or phone numbers slipped, no suspicious behavior from diners or staff whatsoever. They take turns conveying small amounts of their coffee into the ficus. Around the half-hour mark, Dean slips around to the back to pretend to make a phone call and look alone and oblivious, but Sam sees no one approach him from his hiding place behind a dumpster.

Their waitress tops off their coffee one more time with a strained smile. Sam really wishes he could drink it. He's trying to stay focused, to not miss some tiny interaction that might be significant, but he only got a couple of hours last night after a days-long dry spell and he's drifting.

Dean catches his eye. "We are going to have to tip this lady like four hundred percent," he says. "You know anything about this place?"

"Sheriff says it's a local hot spot. Lukewarm spot, anyway."

"But it's established in the community, right? The sheriff knows the owner?"

"Yeah." Sam makes himself focus on his brother. "Got an idea?"

Dean drops a ten on the table and stands. "Well, we can't hang around here all day. We've got crime scenes to break into and that tree's not in a big enough pot." He nods toward the counter, where a much more weather-beaten specimen than their motherly-yet-voluptuous waitress is cracking a roll of pennies into the drawer. "If the sheriff knows the owner, she can't be the siren. Maybe we can use her."

Sam nods, having registered approximately one eighth of the significance of Dean's words, and follows to the register on autopilot. The day laborers at the long table in the middle of the room move mechanically as they remove the shining things in their open chests with knife and fork. When Sam drops back in again, he hears Dean telling the older woman behind the counter, "So if you notice anything interesting, anything at all, I was hoping maybe you could let me hear about it. You know, for our story. A small town newspaper like ours—only way we can compete with those guys from Phoenix is if we can scoop them, you know?"

"Uh-huh." The woman's name tag reads Loretta, and she obviously owns the place. Her tolerant smile says she knows Dean's putting the moves on her for purely mercenary purposes, but that she's willing to enjoy it for what it is. "And what qualifies as 'interesting'?"

"Could be anything." Dean maintains eye contact. "Anybody acting out of character. Might be patrons. Might be an employee."

"Now wait just a second," says Loretta, smile vanishing.

"We're not looking to get anyone in trouble. But if anything rings as weird to you"—Dean slides a stack of bills across the counter under a piece of paper with his current cell number scrawled on it.—"I'd be deeply, _personally_ appreciative if you'd give me a call."

After a second, she reaches out to take the money. Dean lets his fingers trail over the back of her hand and drops a wink; Loretta turns pink and flustered, Sam restrains himself from rolling his eyes, and Bat-Lucifer takes a shrieking dump directly on the counter.

Cold slaps Sam the moment they step outside. It helps tremendously: the sting of the wind rips the fog from his mind and he feels like a functional human being again, or at least close. This is the main thing he needs: to be on his feet, moving. This he can do.

* * *

Pete Lopez and Nathan Vignaux lived in mobile home parks at opposite ends of Hopi Village. Dean takes Pete's place, Sam takes Nathan's.

Most of the homes in the park are single- or double-wide trailers—not large, but livable—but Nathan and Lydia lived in a camper. The thing is tiny. Like, smaller than Frank's, and definitely older. When he slits the crime scene tape on the door, Sam has to duck down to go through it. He lives in a car with his brother and he cannot imagine calling this thing home with another person.

There's little enough to see: one combined kitchenette-dining room-living area, where a couch takes up most of the floor and a battered TV rests on milk crate shelves, and a bedroom halfway partitioned off. It's drafty, and the space heater carefully positioned away from the walls and furniture is ancient. This unmistakably was not a comfortable home.

And yet it was a home. The walls, wherever possible, are covered in photographs of Nathan, Lydia, and Nathan and Lydia together. There's even an arc of them that runs clear across the ceiling, taped in a string: posed photos of them together, candid shots they took of each other. The bulk of them are actually of Nathan. Dozens upon dozens of shots were clearly taken with him unaware. None of them are nudes, yet many of them are shockingly intimate, and—beautiful. In the posed photographs, Nathan is just a stringy white boy barely out of adolescence with a five-dollar haircut and plenty of pimples; but Lydia's photographs of him are artful, almost obsessive. The care and thought she put into choosing angles, lighting, and field of focus, as well as the sheer repetition, all speak to how much she loved him. Desired him. Sam feels like a voyeur.

It isn't just the pictures making him feel that way, either. It's the Christmas lights over the couch, the grocery store cactus whose planter pot says it's named Franny, the tea candles on a ledge over the bed, and, yes, the toys under it. It's the picnic basket under the kitchenette sink, obviously thrifted, and the plastic wine glasses packed in it that are cloudy from use and washing. It's their keys on two little hooks next to each other by the door. The tangible evidence of a life together built in defiance of both poverty and hatred.

All of it is covered in Lydia's blood. The dark stain in the middle of the living room floor shows that's where Nathan hit her first. The camper is so small, though, that the castoff spatter hit everything from the ceiling to the boxes of pasta with orange clearance tags in the kitchen. There's a heavy trail toward the bed: Lydia crawled; Nathan pursued. An arc cross the bedroom partition shows where he hit her again. Inside, on the mattress and linens, the stains are chaotic and more black than red. There's one big one in the middle. This is where Nathan hit her until her jaw dangled.

Sam picks up a coffee can with a slot cut in the lid labeled _DATE NITE,_ which rattles with coins and whispers with ones. He wonders what the siren offered that this couple didn't already have.

_I gave him what he needed. It was you._

Yeah, well. It hasn't been lately.

It doesn't take long to go through what's here. If Nathan has been spending money somewhere he shouldn't have, he was doing it in cash; there are no damning receipts to turn up. Sam rubs his face and feels the latex catch on stubble. He wishes he could open a window. The breeze would wake him up, help him think of another angle.

He jumps when the phone rings, fumbling it out of his pocket. "Yeah?"

"I'm coming to you."

Dean's tone has Sam plenty awake. "What's up?"

"Loretta just called me." Sam is mildly surprised that that worked, and more surprised that it worked this quickly. "One of her waitresses, Miranda Harris, is acting off. She ducked out on break ahead of schedule, and when she came back she was acting, and I quote, 'twitchy as a tweaker.' Then she abandoned her shift. Been working there five years and never missed a day without calling out."

A woman? It hasn't been part of the MO so far, but there's no reason it couldn't happen in principle. "You think the siren got to her?"

"Loretta says she tried to stop her, and all Miranda said was, 'My baby needs me.' Which Loretta thought was pretty fucking weird, considering her youngest child is 18 and dad's home."

Sam glances out the porthole that passes for the living room window before he climbs out of the camper. "Shit."

"The family lives at the other end of the park you're at, I'm almost there."

Sam runs lightly down the lane where Nathan and Lydia's camper sits. "I'll meet you on the main road."


	3. Chapter 3

"This one?"

"I think— No, keep going."

"Can't fucking see for shit."

"Yeah. Wait— There, up there."

The number on the mailbox is faded almost to nothing. 28 Kachina Trail is the last lot before the white drum of a water treatment facility, at the end of the street and shrouded in pines. Dean throws their junker into park on the shoulder.

Three cars are piled into the driveway of number 28. One of them Sam recognizes from the Over Easy parking lot. The house itself is a double-wide set back into the trees, its porch draped in colored Christmas lights. Between them, Sam and Dean have two bronze daggers, no victim's blood to make them work, and no plan; but Miranda's in there and from Loretta's account it sounds like she's infected. If she is, they need her blood, they need her story, and they need to get to her before—

They're halfway down the driveway when the screams start.

They run. The part of Sam's brain that isn't moving his body separates the voices he hears and counts them. Three are inarticulate; the fourth is saying, over and over, _"My baby needs me! My baby! My baby!"_

Through the living room window they see a blond woman raining blows on a tall girl whose arms are flung up before her. It's only a flash, just barely enough to register who's screaming in fury and who's screaming in pain, but the woman has something in her hands. It sprays red when it connects with the girl's arms. The girl stumbles backward toward a Christmas tree. Farther back in the house, someone runs into the room.

Sam and Dean don't communicate. They don't have to, and there's no time. Dean puts on a burst of speed, hits the door, and sends its jamb shattering outward. Sam starts his sprints half a second behind him and vaults over the porch railing and through the open door without pause. While Dean pays the price of kicking in the door in lost time, Sam is launches himself at Miranda Harris. The whole maneuver is coordinated to get him there without losing any momentum, so it doesn't leave any room for considering a third party. This is a problem, because the boy now standing at the threshold between living room and kitchen is holding a rifle.

Dean actually sees it first. "Gun!"

Sam's response to that is hardwired. It's too late to change his trajectory, so when he drops, he tackles Miranda by the knees. In the instant before he collides with her, three things happen: the girl trips, Miranda swings the hammer, and the rifle goes off.

_"Sam!"_

Miranda hits the floor heavily. She's their waitress from this morning, the one poured into her jeans, the one they tipped $7 on a $3 bill. Sam rolls off of her instantly and scans the room, but he already knows from the sound that it wasn't Dean who fired. Dean does have his weapon out and trained on the boy with the rifle, though, so Sam turns his attention to what's in front of him.

The girl is on the floor in front of the Christmas tree. What she tripped on is her father. Mr. Harris fell face-down, so it's hard to guess the exact extent of the damage, but from the blood soaking his camo t-shirt and the pulpy look of the back of his head, he's very dead. The girl has long, pale hair and is a more willowy version of her mother. Her arms are a mess of defensive wounds. There is one deep pock in her temple. Colored lights glisten in the dark fluid welling from it.

Sam moved to restrain Miranda automatically when he rolled off of her, pushing her down hard into the carpet with a hand between her shoulder blades; but that was two or three seconds ago, and it registers now that she's not resisting his hold. She's not moving at all. He rolls her over. Like the girl, her eyes are open. There's a neat hole in her forehead.

The boy stands at the other end of the room, trembling. He hasn't moved since he fired.

Dean shows him his gun, spreading his hands pacifically before holstering it. "Hey. Hey, kid? Put the rifle down. We're not gonna hurt you."

The boy—he can't be more than twenty—doesn't even seem to see Dean. His eyes are riveted on the bodies of what Sam takes to be his father, mother, and sister.

Dean approaches him slowly. The boy has yet to lower the rifle, though that seems more of out shock than any kind of threat. Nevertheless, Dean makes sure his body is in front of Sam's; Sam puts a hand on his own sidearm and shifts so he has line of sight.

"Hey. Hey," Dean says again. "We're FBI, we're here to help. What's your name?"

Nothing. The kid is weedy, in a t-shirt and jeans that seem to hang of him and a buzz cut that suits him not at all. The rifle starts to shake in his grip, but he doesn't even seem aware that he's holding it. Dean glances behind himself, and Sam shakes his head minutely.

That small gesture seems to get through to the boy holding the rifle. He raises his eyes from his dead family to Dean. Something in his expression crumbles. His grip on the rifle shifts, rotating it, and he starts to bring it up under his chin.

Dean takes him down before he can finish lining up the shot. As soon as the kid's down, crashing into the carpet with a short, sharp cry, Dean stands and slides the rifle backward to Sam, who catches it and unloads it immediately. The boy is sitting in a heap, and his skinny shoulders start to shake.

"Oh, God. I killed my mom."

Now the gun's accounted for, Sam checks the sister and father. He already knows the answer, but he has to try. He inhales at the sight of the wounds revealed.

"She—she just showed up, I-I don't know what she's doing here, I thought she was at work, and she just showed up and started acting crazy and I don't even know where she got the hammer but Dad went to ask her what was the matter and she hit him, she—she just— Oh, my God, Kelcie. Kelcie? _Kelcie!"_

His face screws up and the tears start rolling down his face even as he keeps saying it: "Kelcie, Kelcie, Kelcie." The girl with the long blond hair stares at the Christmas lights.

Dean crouches down in front of him, cutting off his view of what's left of his sister. "I need you to focus for a minute. What's your name, kid?"

"Ian."

"Ian, your mom, when she came in, was there anybody with her?"

"No, it was just her." The kid is paper-white, the color of hair-trigger nausea or clinically significant shock. "It was just her. She just started hitting him. So I—I went to get the gun, I don't know, just, Mom and Dad always said if anyone broke in here, go get the gun, I-I-I didn't mean t-to—"

Ian sucks in a ragged breath and falls silent.

Sam comes up to stand behind his brother's shoulder. Dean glances up at him, rises, and nods.

While Dean calls 911, Sam goes to Miranda Harris's body. Kneeling, he slips his own bronze dagger from his jacket, then the one Dean passed him. The rifle was a .22 caliber and the wound is not a through-and-through; Ian is a good shot and she probably died almost instantly, but the wound barely bled, which makes this awkward. After a moment's hesitation, Sam presses a bandanna into the bullet hole and wipes the blood over the daggers. It'll have to do.

"What the hell are you doing?" Ian starts to push to his feet. Dean, phone to his ear, stops him with a hand on his shoulder, and the boy subsides with wide hazel eyes.

Sam wraps the daggers up in the bandanna and disappears them into his jacket. "It's okay," he says, "we're FBI, I'm just—checking."

"Smooth, Kojack," Lucifer says in utter disbelief.

Dean barks, "Yes, I'll hold" into the receiver and paces in the small portion of the living room not occupied by couch, Christmas tree, or corpses. His movements and the lines of his body are so tightly strung that Sam hangs back for long seconds before he comes up to stand beside him; Dean stops, all but vibrating. Sam follows his gaze to a framed photo over the couch: Miranda, Kelcie, Ian, and a man Sam presumes is the unrecognizable one under the tree. They're all in Santa hats in front of a Walmart photography studio backdrop. If Sam had to guess, he'd say it was taken this year.

He tips his head toward the door: _Gonna stash these before the cops get here, be right back._ Tight nod from Dean.

"Maybe take Ian into the other room," Sam suggests quietly.

Dean's eyes flick over the bodies on the floor. "Yeah," he says without inflection. Then he shifts his thumb to cover the microphone on the phone he's still got pressed to his ear and pins Sam with a look. "This thing needs to die."

Sam doesn't look at the bodies. He's seen enough of the bodies. He looks at Ian, sitting cross-legged on the floor. "It will."

Lucifer stands behind Ian, bends, and kisses the crown of his head. "Mine now," he whispers.

* * *

Dean pounds on window glass. Inside, Loretta jumps half a mile where she's counting out the drawer behind the counter of her diner.

"Dean!" Sam hisses. "Take it easy!"

It's dark, the Over Easy has been closed for forty-five minutes, Loretta appears to be alone in there, and a large man with murder in his eyes is banging on her window. Understandably, she goes for the phone. Sam slaps his badge against the glass and elbows Dean to do the same. After several seconds looking from the badges to Dean's face and back, Loretta puts the phone down and comes around the corner. She doesn't open the door, though.

"What's going on?" Her voice is muffled through the double-glazing.

Sam doesn't give Dean a chance to talk. "FBI, Loretta, Agents Perry and Tyler. Sorry we couldn't tell you earlier, but if you call the sheriff's office, they can confirm who we are. Ask for Sheriff Eaton or Deputy Veazley."

"Lemme see those badges again."

They let her. After a minute, she unbolts the door and lets them in.

"All right, what the hell kind of FBI agents go around pretending to be lousy reporters and brib—"

Dean cuts her off. "Do you have any new employees?"

"What? No." Loretta scowls at him, maybe feeling shitty for ratting on her own staff earlier, maybe just annoyed with him. "Everybody's worked here for years, mostly; Marta's the newest, in the back, and she's been here six months. I haven't had a chance to replace Nathan yet."

"Well, you're gonna have to replace Miranda, too," says Dean.

Loretta cuts her eyes to Sam. "What? Miranda—? What's going on?"

"Miranda's dead," Sam says. He sees no point in mentioning their involvement. "There was an altercation at her home this afternoon; she's dead, and so are her husband and daughter. Her son survived."

Sam watches her face as it creases first in suspicion, then in disbelief. "Miranda— _She_ didn't—?"

"Yeah," says Dean.

Loretta gropes for a diner stool. "She was acting so strangely. So strangely. But I never thought— Oh, my God." She looks up at them with huge eyes. "I didn't even call the police. What was I thinking? I should've, but I didn't know—"

Dean visibly reins in his temper. "Well, you called us," he tells her. "Trust me, you couldn't have done better."

"Ian," Loretta says faintly. "You said he's okay?"

Ian is not okay. "Yeah, he's okay," Sam tells her. "Loretta, I'm sorry to have to ask, but everybody who's, um, hurt somebody so far has been here, at this diner. Miranda, Nathan, Pete Lopez, Mr. Burrmeister—"

"Gerry?" Loretta's cigarette-raspy voice is going shrill. "Gerry Burrmeister who's eighty-four?"

"Yeah, Gerry who's eighty-four," says Dean. "He caved in his wife's skull with a hammer, real popular pastime in these parts. And your diner is the only thing all of them have in common, so think: has there been anybody new, anything weird in the last few weeks?"

"There's no one," Loretta insists. "Looking back on it, I guess Miranda and Nathan have both been kind of distracted lately, but we're talking small stuff, taking extra breaks and fiddling with their phones. Until Miranda bugged out earlier today, I wasn't even paying attention. Besides, I thought you said they hurt their own families. What does it matter if they all came here?"

"It matters when it's the only link between them," Sam says.

Loretta bridles at that. "That ex-Army guy wasn't even a regular. And everybody comes in here sooner or later. Fellas, look around: what else is there to do in this town? People go to Flagstaff for their fun if they can, make do with gossiping outside the Dollar General if they can't. Couples sneak into the mini-golf, teenagers hang out at the coin laundry, and criminals do their business in the woods around the Preserve. We don't even have a library. I don't know what to tell you; there isn't anywhere in the whole village that all those people wouldn't have passed through sooner or later."

* * *

It feels late, by the time they get back to the room. When Sam looks at the clock radio and it only says 9:28, that just makes him feel more exhausted.

Before visiting Loretta, they were stuck at the Harris residence for hours while the wheels of small town police procedure ground, standing around the freshest crime scene they were likely to get without being able to search any of it. At least they were able to corroborate that Ian had shot his mother in self-defense; but that was little consolation when he'd been defending himself against the thing they were supposed to have stopped in the first place—and the longer he had to rein it in around real cops, the worse Dean's temper got. Sam wanted to say something, do something to alleviate the pressure, but he kept finding himself checking out as he stood in front of that picture of the Harrises in their sweaters and Santa hats. 

Now, finally, he lets himself slump on the edge of his bed. He feels washed out inside.

Dean goes straight to the duffels and hunts around for something. "Where are they?"

"Huh?"

"The daggers."

Sam starts to reach into his jacket before he remembers that he stashed the bronze daggers smeared with Miranda's blood in the Impala before the sheriff's office showed. "Uh, trunk. Next to the twelve-gauge."

Dean grunts acknowledgment and keeps rooting around. A minute later, he comes up with a tie. "All right, suit up, let's go."

Sam stares uncomprehendingly. The shit the wallpaper's getting up to doesn't help. "Go?"

"To talk to Ian, c'mon, fed suits."

Sam is at a loss. There is some rational, coherent reply to be made, he's sure, but the best he can get to come out of his mouth is, "Now?"

Dean holds up the tie in one hand, a suit jacket in the other. "You got a better lead?"

Sam struggles first to work out why they can't talk to Ian right now, then to put this into words. "They took him to the hospital." Sam and Dean made sure of this. Dean told Sheriff Eaton, in an undertone, about how after he'd put a bullet in his mom, Ian had tried to turn the rifle on himself. "Admission, admission and evaluation and everything takes time, and it's night, and he just lost his entire family."

"Yeah, to the thing we were supposed to stop." Sam flinches; Dean keeps going. "He's the only survivor so far, which means he's our best shot at getting info about his mother that might tell us where this bitch is stalking 'em. Miranda's the second in two _days,_ Sam; you really want to sit around waiting for the next?"

The wallpaper pattern in here is abstract, little green squares layered over each other on cream. It matches nothing whatsoever in the room. The squares fold out into cubes, then out again into hypercubes, then out and out and out in some way Sam's eyes refuse to track to become something impossible, something else. "Dean, I—"

"You were the one who found this case, Sam."

It sounds like an accusation. Sam feels obscurely like he should be accused, but they can't go see Ian. Dean's right, they should be doing something, but interrogating a traumatized kid in the middle of the night isn't it, and Sam tries to make his brain work well enough to come up with a better suggestion and he just can't. "Dean, please, I'm just…."

"What? Squeamish about visiting hours all of a sudden?"

"…Really tired."

Sam presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to block out that wallpaper. The cubes keep on trying to unfold inside his mind, so he drops his hands and stares at what he eventually sorts out are his brother's knees, clad in jeans. Then he notices that those aren't moving—haven't been for a while—and looks up.

The anger has drained out of Dean's expression; the fed clothes are dangling from his hands like he's forgotten about them. "How much sleep did you get last night?"

Sam tries to think and can't.

"You did get back to sleep last night, right?" When Sam doesn't answer, Dean starts toward him, then stops, eyes at once tight and soft with worry. "Sammy, this is getting bad."

"Nothing gets past you," says Lucifer via the lampshade.

"It's fine, I'll just—make an early night of it. I'll be better tomorrow."

"Oh, bunk bud, _will_ you, though?"

Dean's still scanning his face. "Yeah, okay."

Sam goes into the bathroom to get away from the scrutiny. The snake's in the bathtub, so he skips the shower and settles for shaving; as he does, he hears the door to the main room open and shut. His heart constricts—he thought he'd persuaded Dean; he didn't think his brother would just take off for the hospital without him; no, please, Sam is _tired_ —but the sound of the car's engine turning over never comes. He washes his face, brushes his teeth, and, minutes after Dean left in the first place, hears the door open again.

When he emerges, Dean's sitting cross-legged on his bed with the laptop. He reaches over to the nightstand, clears his throat, and says, "Here."

Sam stares at the mug Dean holds out. "Uh," he says intelligently.

"It's, uh, herbal. No caffeine. Sweet-talked the night receptionist into making it for you. And watched her the whole time, so I know she didn't hork any monster spit in there. Anyway, 's supposed to help with insomnia; I looked it up on a website."

What Sam was expecting, he isn't sure, but herbal tea from Dean Winchester wasn't on the list. Suddenly his tongue's thick and he can't trust his voice. That's humiliating, reacting like this to a mug of tea; the humiliation tightens his throat up even more, setting off a whole feedback loop, and in under three seconds he's hanging on by his fingernails.

"Thanks," he manages.

He takes the mug without looking at Dean. The tag on the end of the string says Mint Medley, and the liquid inside is fragrant gold. Steam rises from the surface in delicate tendrils. They reach upward like something climbing out of a hole, unfold into the air like wings—

Sam sets the mug down hastily.

"What, you don't like mint?"

He glances up. The humor's so pale that even like this, Sam can see Dean's concern beneath. He can see it; he just doesn't have enough left in him to figure out what to do about it.

"All right, that's it."

He starts when Dean grips his upper arm—must have spaced out again. Time keeps stuttering; Dean seats him firmly on the edge of his bed, and just in the interval between standing up and sitting down, a few frames fall out of the reel.

Dean's hands clasp his face to either side. They're so warm. Dean's mouth frowns, and Dean's eyes worry, and just for a second, one thumb rubs over Sam's cheekbone, rasping in the twelve o'clock shadow. With hyperclarity, Sam feels three fingers comb once through the hair at his temple. He leans into the touch only to lurch and catch himself on the mattress: at some point between Dean holding Sam's face and Sam registering it, Dean moved. Now he's down on the floor, tugging Sam's shoes off like Sam is five again. Mute, Sam sits and watches, also like he is five again.

"C'mon," Dean says. His fingers are _so warm_ through Sam's socks. "Let's get you horizontal."

Sam moves to comply with Dean's tug-push only to freeze at the sight of his own hand on the mattress. The bedspreads here are quilted, thin batting pierced by lines of stitching. Beads of serous fluid well in each tiny hole left by the thread; they're golden, the same color as the tea almost exactly.

"Sam?" Dean prompts.

Sam swallows. The beads of fluid are growing where his weight depresses the mattress under the heel of his hand, overflowing and mating with their neighbors. In the biggest ones, something thicker and more purulent is starting to spool out as whatever is beneath the faux-Navajo patterned surface is forced up and out.

"First step in going to sleep is usually getting into bed." Dean sounds a fraction less patient than he did a moment ago.

Sam breathes in and carefully removes his hand from the bedspread, wiping it discreetly on his knee and forcing down a shudder. "Right. Yeah."

Dean's still on his knees, on the carpet, looking up. His eyes are large and dark. "Okay."

He moistens his lips with his tongue. Sam wonders what he's going to say, but the wondering is high up and far to one side; he scrabbles to catch hold of that part of his mind and bring it back down to himself, but he's got no purchase, and the room is clamoring, and Lucifer is smirking at him from the bathroom, and the snake is coming over the carpet, and meanwhile Dean—

—reaches for his face again. His hand is slick with what the bed is leaking, and Sam recoils before he can intercept the instruction from his hindbrain.

Dean stops. One look at his face is enough to know that he's misunderstood Sam's reaction.

"Sorry," Sam blurts. "Sorry, it's just—Lucifer."

A moment ago, there was a look on Dean's face: something somehow worried, and pleading, and vulnerable, and hungry all at once, and Sam didn't know what to do with it. It's too late now. His expression is shuttered over and completely neutral, and it makes Sam's mouth go dry. "Yeah, of course," Dean says.

Sam doesn't have the resources left over to work out why his instincts say that this bizarre interaction that he isn't even totally sure is happening is a greater threat than when he'd thought Dean was ditching him to go to the hospital. So, he's left with just the unfiltered panic. He clamps down on it; he needs to keep a fucking lid on. "It's just Lucifer," he says again, trying not to sound desperate. "I'm just tired, so I can't keep him out."

Dean glances from Sam to Sam's unrumpled covers to Sam's unsipped tea to Sam again. A sardonic, self-deprecatory smile creases the corner of his mouth, there and gone. "Yeah, you said." He climbs to his feet.

Sam has no idea how to explain about the beds, about what's under there and how he cannot peel back this leaking top layer, or about half the things he really means when he gives up and just says _Lucifer;_ all he can do is watch his brother assume— What is Dean assuming, exactly? That Sam isn't drinking the tea Dean went out and got him because it's not good enough? That he isn't sleeping because he doesn't want to? That his mind is coming apart because he can't be bothered to stop it?

Dean lifts the laptop from his bed and tosses it onto Sam's ( _God,_ the things that come out under the force of the impact). "All yours. I'm going out."

"You're— To a bar? Dean, the siren's out there!"

Dean grabs his jacket and keys. "I'm not an idiot, Sam; I'm going to Flagstaff. I'd tell you not to wait up, but, y'know, you do you."

The door closes behind him. Sam is left with a mug of tea and an empty room.

Well. Not quite empty, of course.

The Devil crowds in, straddling him from behind, icy breath and icy body, and Sam shudders. "You wanted him to leave, really, didn't you, so that we could be alone? How romantic."

Sam jumps up, grabs the laptop, and takes a seat at the wobbly table, where at least he has the back of the chair between himself and the presence draping itself over his back. The snake starts to climb the front chair leg; Sam kicks it. He pulls up Flagstaff on Google Maps and runs a search for bars—it's not hard to pick out the one Dean will choose—just in case something happens and Sam has to go get him.

"Like you could drive right now if you tried." The voice comes from the jackalope over the beds. "You'd wrap yourself around a tree before you made it out of town. Quite unintentionally, of course."

"Blow me," Sam snarls.

"Kinky," says the jackalope.

"Now, Sam," the light bulb flashes in Morse code, "no need to be like that. I'm sure you'd never willingly leave Dean all alone. I'm sure you'd never kill yourself just to get back to me."

Sam grits his teeth. Frustration is, if nothing else, helping him focus. He logs into his back door access to Harvard's classics department's digital manuscripts collection and starts searching for different transliterations of _Σειρῆνες._

They already know how to kill it. That's one item in the positives column; their last encounter with a siren may have been a thoroughgoing shit show, but they do have 100% confirmation that a bronze dagger dipped in the blood of someone under the spell will do the job. What they did not learn how to do from said shit show and have not learned how to do since is how to identity this thing. They need something, anything to go on other than hoping they can pull a Poirot before it reels them in again.

Laughter rains down the motel room walls like condensation.

_They sit in a meadow; men's corpses lie heaped up all round them, mouldering upon the bones as the skin decays._

"Good old Homer," says the wall sconce. It has a voice like gravel in a can.

Sam clicks on. Homer he knows backward and forward; Euripides wrote more social commentary than lore. In any case, there tends to be an inverse relationship between literary prominence and fidelity.

The radio, without turning on, begins to play static.

_The Seirens sing to Odysseus the things most likely to please him, reciting what would appeal to his ambition and knowledge. "For we know," say they, "all other things and all that shall befall upon the fruitful earth."_

Mental fog keeps crowding back in; Sam shakes himself and slaps his own cheeks and fights to process what he's just read enough to work out why his mind got caught on it. This is—Sam checks the citation—Athenaeus, a commentary on Homeric tradition in the _Deipnosophistae._ What's being described is an appeal not to carnal appetites or sexual desires, but to whatever the target's greatest hunger is, regardless of the form it takes. The things most likely to please him: it's very nearly what Nick-the-siren said himself.

Sam loses too much time reading the rest of the passage over and over again without taking any of it in before he realizes that there's nothing else here. That Athenaeus was right about this one specific issue speaks well of the quality of his information, but Sam needs information about something else. He has to go back, try to find—he digs his thumbnail into his palm to try to sharpen up the world—contemporaries, sources.

_From their chests up they had the form of sparrows, below they were women; mythologers say they were little birds with women's faces who beguiled sailors as they passed them by, bewitching with lewd songs the hearing of those hearkening to them; and the song of sensuality has no good consequence, only death._

"Good work, Sparky. Put out an APB on Shirley McLoon and the day is saved."

_The siren is an animal which makes wax, similar to a bee. A siren announces a friend but a bee a stranger._

"You ever wonder why Dean sometimes looks at you like you're a stranger? It's because you are. That's just the numbers, Sam-o. Twenty-eight years up here, centuries down there—you don't know each other anymore."

_For the story goes that the Muses won, plucked out the Sirens' feathers, and made crowns for themselves from them. The harpy-limbed, clear-voiced daughters of Akheloios._

"It's nobody's fault. Think about how much distance opened up between you when he came back from the pit: 's just how it goes. He doesn't know you like I do, and you don't know him like you know me."

_What barren nightingale, slayer of the Centaurs, shall not with her varied melody tempt them to waste away through fasting from food?_

Two hands, two very large hands, settle on Sam's shoulders. "But it's more than just the numbers, isn't it? Think, Sam: what is Hell _for?"_

"It's not _for_ anything," Sam whispers. The snake coils around the leg of his chair like an affectionate cat.

"But doesn't it taste just a little like hope every time I tell you it might be?"

Athenaeus, Apollonius Rhodius, Pseudo-Apollodorus, Lycophron, Hyginus, Pausanias. Sam presses the heels of his hands hard into his eyes to try to stop the names from swimming. Satan just will not shut up.

"How can you even remember things with a fleshy, earthly brain that have no fleshy, earthly referent?" asked the wall sconce. "What did you think was going to happen? You tried to warn you."

_And as they sailed past, Orpheus restrained the Argonauts by chanting a counter-melody. An oracle said that the Sirens would die if ever a ship made it past them; and indeed they died._

"All of this"—The walls were threatening to turn Klein bottle.—"the _Hellraiser_ bits, the Euclid-hostile takeover, the never-fucking-ending _Naked Lunch,_ is just what you get when you try to run programming on the wrong hardware."

"And I'm the wrong hardware?" Sam knows better than to engage, and yet.

The hands on his shoulders burn cold down to the bone. "The world's the wrong hardware. You just happen to be part of it."

_Odysseus proved fatal to them, for when by his cleverness he passed by the rocks where they dwelt they threw themselves into the sea._

Useless. All of this shit is useless. Sam tries to type more, but the keys start bleeding.

"You know, technically, Sam, that's you doing that." The blood wells up under each black square; he's fighting against a keyboard that just gets gummier and gummier. "You're the one keeping you awake, which means… you want it." The voice is more palpable than audible, just air hitting the shell of his ear. Each one is so soft it makes Sam think of squeezing puffball mushrooms, little explosions of spores. "Sleep dep is torture, you said? Well, it's torturing yourself, which means… you want it."

Okay, forget typing. He brings up a map of the town and tries to think about what they know. He drops a flag on each of the relevant locations—Pete's house, Nathan's house, Gerald's house, Miranda's house, diner—and tries to discern some kind of pattern. His eyes cross and he closes the tab. Paper, maybe paper will be easier. He lays out the hard copies of the police files they have, first Nathan, then Pete. Miranda's is just now being born.

Lydia Figueroa is probably the worst in pictures. Pete's partner, Gerry's wife, Miranda's husband and daughter: there is carnage in each of them, certainly, that awful immediacy and inanity of death that hollows out beholders and leaves no grace behind; but the faces are all either fairly intact or completely obliterated. Lydia's face is both, and it should turn Sam's stomach but mainly it makes him fight tears.

Lucifer uses the first voice in which she ever spoke to him to say, "'These violent delights have violent ends.'"

Sam shoves the contents of the table off of it.

Files and photos hit the floor. Ghosts of them rise flapping into the air; a second wave follows, more attenuated, then a third. The air is full of fading, fluttering forms.

He paces in a rapid circle with his fingers in his hair. "Why am I like this? Why am I _like_ this?"

"Baby, you know why." Lucifer sounds like she aches for him. "You could pull yourself together like anyone else if you really tried. If you wanted it enough, you'd sleep just fine."

Sam feels an inch away from meltdown, except even the thought of that is wearying. Laughter bubbles up in his chest and suffocates him. The one thing keeping a twenty-eight-year-old adult male from crying on the baby-shit brown motel carpet is that he's too tired to squeeze the water out.

—The baby-shit brown motel carpet that he's on. Not quite sure when that happened. The stuff thrums under his ass. He's down in the well between the beds, folded up with his back against Dean's bed and his feet against his own, which puts him directly beneath the jackalope. He can't see any of it, because his eyes are clamped shut, but he can hear and feel and _know_ that there is entirely too fucking much going on in this room, every second.

"Where is he?" he moans with his temple pressed against the drawer of the nightstand.

Lucifer strokes his hair, scraping his scalp lightly with her nails on each pass. "He's out getting wasted because you drove him off again, remember?"

"I want Dean," he says, wretched.

"Do you, babe?" Her hair falls against his shoulder where she's leaned in close. "If Dean was what you really wanted, do you think this is the way you'd act?"

"Please. Please just go away."

"If you meant it, I'd already be gone."

Sam rolls his forehead against the edge of the nightstand, then does it again a little harder. The pain won't magic anything away at this point, but at least it gives him a distinct sensation to focus on. And he has to focus. He has to get a grip, because if he doesn't, if Dean comes back and finds him like this—

"Yeah, he wouldn't take it very well. I mean, he already hasn't, right? Well, who can blame him. You rejected all the comfort he tried to offer you and magicked me up instead. I'm very flattered, of course."

Sam looks up. The mug is still sitting on the nightstand, inches away; it's long since gone cold—nothing rising out of there now.

"A little needy, maybe, but hey, we were made for each other. Hardly Dean's fault he can't give you what you want, when what you want's the problem."

"You're wrong," Sam says, and picks up the tea.

He spills half of it on himself, but after the second swallow his hands steady, and by the time he finishes, he's actually calmer. He makes himself focus on the sensations of swallowing and by the end, the panic's still there, but it's less consuming. It's _in_ him, but it _isn't_ him. He clings to that.

Apart from some lightheadedness, standing up goes all right, but all the stooping and straightening involved in picking up the papers all over the floor flushes the ballast right out of the world. Food, he tells himself. If he really means it, he's going to have to eat food.

Six Clif Bars are in his duffel. So far today, Sam has yet to eat anything; if he ate all of them, he'd still be about 500 calories in arrears. But he can't let himself think that way. If he thinks about the numbers then what he _should_ do feels too huge and he'll end up eating nothing. He grabs two of them and tears one open.

There he hesitates. He can't afford to, can't afford the loss of momentum. Here he is, strategizing against a gas station energy bar like it's life or death. It's been that kind of fucking day.

"That can't feed you. The kind of food you miss, Sam—it isn't up here."

Sam digs deep for his last few inches of _fuck you_ and starts eating.

The Clif Bars have the natural origins and crumb of plastique, but he gets through them. He ignores the multi-sensory cacophony around him, chews, swallows, and lies on his back on the bed without bothering to brush his teeth. 

"You won't sleep," his other self says.

"Maybe not," Sam tells the ceiling. "But I'm not playing any fucking string games tonight, either."

He closes his eyes.

An hour or so later, Dean comes in. His boots scuff on the carpet, and bar smoke and snow-air waft off his jacket as he stands at the foot of Sam's bed. Sam doesn't open his eyes, but he doesn't pretend to be asleep, either. After a few minutes, Dean moves off to the bathroom. Running water and the clink of a belt buckle weave into the soundscape of the room.

Something eases in Sam's chest when he hears the springs sink down on the mattress next to his. The rustle of bedclothes, the long, sinus-clearing sniff—all of it's familiar as breathing. Just before the lamp clicks off, he hears the tell-tale clink of the empty mug being picked up and set down again.


End file.
